


Finders, Keepers; Losers, Weepers

by Crewe



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Angst, Character Study, Family Feels, Gen, ever get emotional about goliaths?? im here for you
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-28
Updated: 2017-05-28
Packaged: 2018-11-05 20:49:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,932
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11021322
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Crewe/pseuds/Crewe
Summary: Grog learned a lot of things growing up. For example:- You hold on to what you have with everything you've got.- Sometimes you lose them anyway.





	Finders, Keepers; Losers, Weepers

**Author's Note:**

> so you know how grog gets real possessive when he finds something he likes (ex. the deck) um. i have emotions about that?
> 
> so heres a story about found family
> 
> sorry for the goliath angst

Grog knows what it is to have things; the notion of _possession_ is ingrained in him bone-deep, in the same way the blood-rush of adrenaline and the deep muscle-aching triumph of a battle well-won is.

 

Roaming the plains with the Herd of Storms, being kicked around by anyone bigger than him and doing some kicking himself, he didn’t learn many of the things his friends know, with their existence pinned in by the walls of buildings and their lessons drawn from the inscrutable lines of books. He doesn’t know how to decipher symbols to get their meanings. He doesn’t understand how the concept of _how many_ can have a word, can have many words depending on just how big the _how many_ is, how you can do things with those words that have nothing to do with physical objects. He doesn’t know ten different words for the same thing, and he has trouble remembering words that get too long or hard to say. He learned _real_ things, things he can see and hear and feel, with his hands and in the strength of his grip and in the ache of his bruises and deep in his chest where the truth hides.

 

Grog knows that strength is power, and power gives you the right to what you want.

 

He knows that Kevdak can beat him down because Kevdak is stronger than he is. He knows the Herd can conquer everything in its path because the Herd of Storms is stronger than anything. He learns that the secret to being a warrior is in building your strength and harnessing your rage until you can crush everything in your path. He feels his fists clench and his blood rush and his teeth grind and with every swing of his fist—club—hammer—axe—sword—he feels the truth.

 

Grog knows that you take what you want and you hang onto it.

 

He knows that if he lets go, someone will take it. Food. Weapons. Trinkets. If he doesn’t snatch it, someone else will. If he gives it up, he’ll never see it again. He learns to stand his ground and fight for what he has with everything he’s got.

 

( _He thinks sometimes that he remembers someone fighting for him; he thinks he knew what it was like to feel safe and secure, that someone was watching out for him. He shakes those thoughts off and bares his teeth when a cousin looks sideways at his dinner._ )

 

Grog knows that what’s his is _his_.

 

He knows that anything he takes he can fight for. Anything he lays his hands on becomes an extension of him, something he has a right to defend. He sees his uncle bash the head in of someone who lays a hand on his gauntlets. He curls himself tight around his bag of prizes ( _colorful beads and shiny rocks, a small mirror snatched from an abandoned shop window_ ) and wishes he could sink them inside himself, where no one could touch them but him.

 

Grog knows that Kevdak is wrong.

 

He knows the old man doesn’t deserve to be beaten. He knows that he is weak, and small, and harmless. He knows that his uncle thinks anyone like that should be trampled on. Grog watches, and feels his stomach turn, and he learns something about himself.

 

Grog knows that there is more than one way to be strong.

 

He takes that nugget of truth inside of himself, that turns his stomach and curls his toes, and instead of turning away from it he nurses it. At night, when the herd is occupied with the nightly rituals of settling for camp, he goes back to the little old man. His spine prickles with the feeling of the eyes of the herd and Kevdak’s impending wrath sits heavily on his shoulders as he clumsily ties torn strips off his ragged pants around the old man’s wounds, presses a stale crust of bread from his bag of treasures into his hands, and points him back towards town.

 

It doesn’t take long for Kevdak to learn that Grog has defied him. He sees Grog with his shoulders back and chin high and he is not pleased.

 

Grog loses his place in the herd and his bag of treasures and thinks then he might as well lose his life, too, and then the little old man finds him.

 

Grog knows that there is more than one kind of possession.

 

“You can be like my big brother!” Pike exclaims within minutes of meeting him, hands on her hips and her eyes shining. Grog is entranced immediately; he wants to touch her light hair and marvel at her tiny fists but is worried he might break her, shatter her like so many of the bright things he finds.

 

“What’s that like, then?” he finally asks when she doesn’t give up staring like she wants a response. He’s never had a sister before, and he tells her.

 

“It’s like…” Pike taps her chin and tilts her head in thought. Grog finds himself mirroring her. “It’s like having someone who’s a little bit a part of you, who’s the most important person to you, who you love no matter what, and who you look after and who looks after you.” She nods, satisfied, and gives him a dazzling grin. He can’t help but grin back.

 

“Yeah, all right, then,” he says, and tentatively holds out a hand. She grabs it with surprising strength and Grog loves this little girl already, who’s so different from anyone he’s ever known and radiant with it. He squeezes her hand ( _as gently as he can, but he’s had no practice with gently, he’s afraid he’s hurt her but she just keeps grinning, grinning_ ) and vows to fight for her, that she is his now and no one and nothing can take her from him. “I’ll be your brother.”

 

Grog knows that there is more than one kind of family.

 

There is the family you are born with; he remembers only vaguely having one of his own, but he carries the name _Strongjaw_ because it is his oldest belonging and he knows it belonged to his father before him. “Names are powerful things,” the Trickfoots tell him knowingly, so he holds onto it and wonders what his father would think of him now.

 

He sees the way Kevdak looks at Xanthor, how he would sometimes hit him twice as hard as all the others and sometimes would hold him up above everyone else, and knows that sometimes the family you are born into is complicated and sometimes it is a curse.

 

He sees the way Wilhelm looks at Pike, the soft adoration in his eyes and the way he cares for her in what is to Grog an entirely unprecedented manner, and knows that sometimes the family you are born into is complicated but sometimes it is a blessing.

 

There is the family that chooses you; he puts Pike on his shoulder and runs through the streets of Westruun laughing, eyes glinting with all the mischief a goliath and a gnome can get up to. They introduce themselves as brother and sister with puffed out chests and giggle behind their hands at the puzzled looks they get. He sits in the chair Wilhelm got for him specifically _(his chair, and when Wilhelm said to him offhand, “I got this for you, Grog,” he stares at him uncomprehendingly for several long seconds until the old man’s eyes went sad and gentle, as they sometimes did_ ), and he eats with the Trickfoots and feels warm in a way that’s different from a campfire or the heat of battle, softer and safer, and he knows that this kind of family is the greatest kind, instilling in him a quiet sense of awe and the constant state of shock that something like this could happen to him; that people like Wilhelm and Pike could find him and choose him and bring him home. It makes him feel humble in a way he never thought he could stand.

 

There is the family that you choose.

 

He meets Vox Machina in a bar, long before they were Vox Machina, before they were the S.H.I.T.S., before they were anything other than some interesting strangers looking to hire someone who’s good in a fight, and Grog may have left the Herd of Storms but the storm is still in his blood, and when sharp-eyed twins with dark hair and pointed ears look him up and down and say “ _Hey, big guy, how well can you handle that sword?_ ”, he bares his teeth and grins.

 

He gathers his party like treasures: Pike, of course, his Pike who hung the sun, Vax, who he can laugh at and with and who is slipperier than a person should ever be and wears his heart on his sleeve in a way that’s just embarrassing, Vex who’s sharper than her twin and shares Grog’s feelings on shiny objects, Keyleth who wields absurd amounts of power in such a small frame that Grog can’t help but be impressed, Percy who thinks he’s better than everyone and built machines to kill for him but in rare moments will let himself slip and grin with a certain wild abandon that belies his own little storm inside… and Scanlan, the funniest and most interesting person Grog has ever met ( _aside from Pike, of course_ ), who looks at Grog seriously and asks him for his opinion, takes him on secret wild adventures through the streets of new cities, who is scared of fighting but makes miracles happen on the battlefield.

 

He looks at his party, and feels warm with satisfaction knowing these people are _his_ ; he found them, he snatched them up and he will fight for them with everything he has. He learns to harness not only his rage but his _love_ , which is the word he gets when he goes to Pike one night and asks her what that feeling in his chest is called, possessiveness and affection and the knowledge that he’d die for these people all at once. She puts her hands on his and smiles and smiles and says “It’s called love, Grog. You love them. It’s okay, I do too,” and he smiles back and hugs her and thinks _love_ and _brother_ are very similar, and it’s silly how many words there are for the same feeling.

 

Grog knows that sometimes you lose.

 

He learned this a long time ago, when he still ran the plains with the herd. He learned then that anything you have can be taken from you if you aren’t strong enough, if you don’t fight for it hard enough. Everything can be ripped away if you don’t cling to it with everything you’ve got, and sometimes even then. He learns it again, over and over, traveling with Vox Machina.

 

He claims the bag of holding for himself. He stares Vex down with one hand clenched around the leather neck until she narrows her eyes and lets it go. He stores everything they find in there, leaving nothing behind when he can help it. He keeps track of their loot, meticulously, rattling off long lists of objects whenever the topic comes up, to shocked looks from party members who frankly had no idea what was in the damn thing. They lose things, anyway; things go bad, rot away, are thrown out when the rest of the party deems them useless. Things break, things are sold, things are given away to others ( _and Grog knows that giving is a good thing, remembers a cold night and an old man, but he still can’t help himself from watching their things as they’re carried away and closing his fist reflexively around the bag_ ). Losing things is a part of adventuring.

 

So, it turns out, is losing people.

 

Pike dies and Grog can’t breathe, can’t see or hear or feel anything but the pounding of his heart in his chest and the rushing of his blood in his ears, all yelling at him to _do something, do something, do something_ —so he does the only thing he knows how and throws himself back into the fight, tears and slashes until the wretched thing is dead and he can cradle his sister’s tiny, broken body in his hands.

 

They get her back. The gods give her back, and Grog swears to himself that nothing like that will ever happen again. He would give up everything he has ever owned if it meant never losing a party member because as it turns out losing a person is the worst kind of loss and he thought he knew that, _intellectually_ , as Percy would say, but there is something very different between thinking _I do not want to lose them_ and really feeling his heart ripped from his chest.

 

It happens again.

 

He loses them, one by one, they die as he watches helplessly and every time they come back but every time there is at least a moment where he realizes they might not and he swears to himself that _this time, this time is the last_. He sees Pike doing the same, under her constant cheer that she wears the way he wears his rage, and he holds her tight and together they mourn their own fallibility.

 

Grog knows that sometimes you are _left_.

 

He was abandoned by his herd and it hurt, it hurt worse than anything he had known up till then, the shame and loss a sharp pain in his chest, so bad that that night he hadn’t seen the point of seeing the dawn. _Abandonment_ is not something Grog wears well. At first afterwards, he had shied away from Wilhelm, waiting, watching for the move that would leave him alone again. Burned once and now seeing fire everywhere out of the corner of his eyes, it took a long time to trust that the gnomes wouldn’t leave him.

 

He didn’t expect it from Vox Machina, because _he_ had picked _them_ , see, they couldn’t abandon him because he wasn’t theirs to abandon.

 

He didn’t realize his mistake until it was too late.

 

First, Tiberius leaves them, and he was gone for so long before he told them it was for good that it softens the blow, feels almost like something he already should have known. But it still hurts, still somehow catches him off guard, because he never thought that it was _possible_ for one of them to walk away, to simply decide not to be with them anymore and follow through, and the simple fact that this had nothing to do with him, that there was nothing he did or didn’t do that influenced this decision, leaves him shaken. By the time the reality sets in they’ve already moved on to the next mission, the next fight, and Grog sets aside the loss with the other things he doesn’t understand or want to think about, and only in the darkest part of the night, when he wakes up breathing hard without knowing why, does he let himself ask if this was something he could have fought harder to prevent.

 

And then Scanlan walks out.

 

And this one is his fault; Scanlan says as much before he goes, lashes out at the entire party and Grog realizes that sometimes words can hurt worse than weapons and then his best friend is gone because Grog didn’t love him enough.

 

He gets drunk, because he doesn’t want to think, doesn’t like thinking at most times but especially not now. He can’t stand the thoughts, questions only Scanlan can answer, so he buries himself under mountains of tankards and is only passingly aware of other party members as they join and leave him.

 

Eventually he becomes aware of Pike by his side in the empty room, one hand on his arm and staring into her own mug. He looks down at her and she meets his eyes and his vision is swimming but he thinks she’s been crying so he drops his mug with a heavy _thud_ and gathers her into his arms. Distantly, he thinks he’s probably squeezing too hard but Pike doesn’t say anything, squeezing him back as hard as she can ( _and she's strong, so strong, his Pike, little monstah_ ).

 

Through his drunken haze, he manages to get out, “I don’t know my mother’s name, either.”

 

It turns out Pike could, in fact, squeeze harder.

 

Grog knows that strength is power, and power is how you protect the things that matter to you.

 

Grog knows that there are different kinds of strength.

 

He drags himself out of bed the next morning, and the morning after that, and the morning after that, and he fights for his friends and he continues doing what he always does despite the desperate feeling of something _wrong_ and he holds Pike when she comes to him with tears in her eyes and he puts a heavy hand on Vex’s trembling shoulders as she stares into her drink and he doesn’t know where he gets the strength to do it but he knows it doesn’t come from his muscles.

 

He knows now that strength is not the only thing that will keep your family together, that sometimes you need softer, more complicated things.

 

He doesn’t know how to do that.

 

Grog knows what it is to have things ( _treasure, a home, a family_ ), and he knows what it is to lose them.

 

He holds on with everything he’s got.


End file.
